1. Field of the Disclosed Embodiments
This disclosure relates to systems and methods for providing improved access to inter-company resources among related companies in a same industry, including an improved mechanism where airline aircrew members and other employees, including pilots, cabin flight crew and others can be validated as to eligibility to participate in cabin access programs, using automation and applying various rules and features.
2. Related Art
In many industries today, there are increased efforts toward inter-corporation cooperation when such cooperation may prove mutually beneficial to the participating corporations, companies, organizations or entities. In such scenarios, it is generally the mutual benefit between the participating corporations, companies, organizations or entities in which neither of the participating corporations, companies, organizations or entities achieves some significant advantage over the competitors with whom they choose to cooperate. In other words, any agreements for cooperative sharing of corporation, company, organization or entity resources will likely be predicated on some definable quid pro quo as between the participating corporations, companies, organizations or entities. Each corporation, company, organization or entity will more likely be willing to participate in some cooperative venture based on an assurance that the benefit as between it and other corporations, companies, organizations or entities will be reasonably equal.
As an example of the above-discussed inter-corporation cooperation, the aviation industry may provide a reasonable model that is subject to review and potentially to improvement. Currently, those familiar with the aviation industry understand that frequently pilots and cabin crew may be required to travel to specified locations (airports), which may be at some distance from their domiciles, to perform their jobs as required by the airlines that employ them. Separately, there may be instances in which particular pilots and/or cabin crew may bid a line that requires them to “deadhead” from a point of arrival for one scheduled evolution to a separate point of departure for a next scheduled evolution. As such, there are in-place scenarios for facilitating the availability of airline aircrew member transport that a particular airline may choose to afford to its employees, but which may be limitedly available in certain instances based on open seat availability.
As a benefit to its employees, many of the major airlines provide employees, and employee family members, an opportunity to travel space available between destinations. The scenario often works well when the travel plans of any particular individual are not time-constrained. In situations, however, where pilots and cabin crew must attempt to make arrangements to get from point A to point B on their own to be available for required airline duties, non-availability of seating on the airline that employs the individual pilot or cabin crew member, scheduling problems and myriad other logistic issues may require those pilots and/or cabin crew members to make extensive arrangements in order to assure themselves of being in a particular place at a particular time to assume their actual flight duties.
This flexibility in being able to avail oneself of one's own choices where the individual may wish to live, while maintaining an ability to travel economically, often at no cost, to their appointed place of duty, is a generally recognized benefit of airline employment. In order to facilitate this flexibility, airlines typically enter into cooperative agreements that allow them, in a mutually beneficial manner, to reduce costs, streamline pilot and cabin crew travel times and thereby to expand the allowable flexibility in the living arrangements of certain of their employees while ensuring availability of those employees to perform the required duties.
Currently, a service is provided among participating air carriers that is known as Cockpit Access Security System or CASS. The CASS service provides a relatively easy accessibility verification scheme made available for pilots of participating air carriers to allow the admission of another airline deadheading pilot to a cockpit jump seat, where available, for transport to a destination airport. The CASS Hosted service is advertised as a configuration that eliminates cost of individual airline internal application development. The CASS service is approved and regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) for use among participating air carriers in the United States. More broadly, however, the CASS service is used by over 85 airlines worldwide. The CASS service provides the participating airlines with an ability to afford their cockpit aircrew members the valuable freedom of jump-seat travel to facilitate operating flexibility. Participating air carriers widely employ the service to save money, increase security, and boost personnel efficiency. No longer do cockpit aircrew members necessarily need to compete with other airline standby passengers when traveling to their next destination, a scenario which was often time consuming and frustrating for those individual cockpit aircrew members. For those air carriers operating within the CASS service coverage, airport gate agents are provided with an ability to query the personal records of airline employees, simply verifying their identity and credentials through one or more network-centric communications pathways.
Participating air carriers may today choose between two CASS configurations. With a distributed configuration, airlines maintain an onsite personnel database. ARINC (now Rockwell Collins) also offers a hosted configuration that air carriers may be afforded an opportunity to access through a directed secure communication connection.